English-language spelling reform
Such spelling reform seeks to change English orthography so that it is more consistent, matches pronunciation better, and follows the alphabetic principle.
Early writers of this new English, such as Geoffrey Chaucer, gave it a fairly consistent spelling system, but this was soon diluted by Chancery clerks who re-spelled words based on French orthography.
[2] English spelling consistency was dealt a further blow when William Caxton brought the printing press to London in 1476.
Examples include the silent h in ghost (to match Dutch gheest, which later became geest), aghast, ghastly and gherkin.
These proposals ranged from expansive systems of respelling (e.g. John Hart's) to essays calling for nonspecific change (e.g. Sir Thomas Smith's).
Some of them are detailed below: These proposals generally did not attract serious consideration because they were too radical or were based on an insufficient understanding of the phonology of English.
In 1898, the American National Education Association adopted its own list of 12 words to be used in all writings: tho, altho, thoro, thorofare, thru, thruout, catalog, decalog, demagog, pedagog, prolog, program.
[13] In August 1906, the SSB word list was adopted by Theodore Roosevelt, who ordered the Government Printing Office to start using them immediately.
The handbook noted that every reformed spelling now in general use was originally the overt act of a lone writer, who was followed at first by a small minority.
Among members of the society, the conditions of his will gave rise to major disagreements, which hindered the development of a single new system.
Over a two-month spell in 1934, it introduced 80 respelled words, including tho, thru, thoro, agast, burocrat, frate, harth, herse, iland, rime, staf and telegraf.
[10] In 1949, a Labour MP, Dr Mont Follick, introduced a private member's bill in the House of Commons, which failed at the second reading.
In 1961, this led to James Pitman's Initial Teaching Alphabet, introduced into many British schools in an attempt to improve child literacy.
that spelling reform would make English easier to learn to read (decode), to spell, and to pronounce, making it more useful for international communication, reducing educational budgets (reducing literacy teachers, remediation costs, and literacy programs) and/or enabling teachers and learners to spend more time on more important subjects or expanding subjects.
[21] Books written with cut spelling could be printed on fewer pages, conserving resources such as paper and ink.
This applies to all aspects of daily living including shopping receipts, office documents, newspapers and magazines, and internet traffic.
[citation needed] Reduced spelling is currently practiced on informal internet platforms and is common in text messaging.
This makes English spelling even less intuitive for foreign learners than it is for native speakers, which is of importance for an international auxiliary language.
Unlike many other languages, English spelling has never been systematically updated and thus today only partly holds to the alphabetic principle.
Likewise, many graphemes in English have multiple pronunciations and decodings, such as ough in words like through, though, thought, thorough, tough, trough, and plough.
Such ambiguity is particularly problematic in the case of heteronyms (homographs with different pronunciations that vary with meaning), such as bow, desert, live, read, tear, wind, and wound.
A closer relationship between phonemes and spellings would eliminate many exceptions and ambiguities, making the language easier and faster to master.
As noted earlier, in the 16th century, some scholars of Greek and Latin literature tried to make English words look more like their Graeco-Latin counterparts, at times even erroneously.
They did this by adding silent letters, so det became debt, dout became doubt, sithe became scythe, iland became island, ake became ache, and so on.
Other examples of older spellings that are more phonetic include frend for friend (as on Shakespeare's grave), agenst for against, yeeld for yield, bild for build, cort for court, sted for stead, delite for delight, entise for entice, gost for ghost, harth for hearth, rime for rhyme, sum for some, tung for tongue, and many others.
Edmund Spenser, for example, used spellings such as rize, wize and advize in his famous poem The Faerie Queene, published in the 1590s.
The irregular spelling of very common words, such as are, have, done, of, would makes it difficult to fix them without introducing a noticeable change to the appearance of English text.
English is the only one of the top ten major languages with no associated worldwide regulatory body with the power to promulgate spelling changes.
These proposals seek to eliminate the extensive use of digraphs (such as "ch", "gh", "kn-", "-ng", "ph", "qu", "sh", voiced and voiceless "th", and "wh-") by introducing new letters and/or diacritics.
